Teaching colours
When to introduce 'harder' colours?

I'm a little unsure of when to introduce harder colours to my DD. She knows the basics (blue, green, red, yellow, orange, brown, pink, purple, black). We are working on white and grey.

But for the in-between colours I've been saying it's a bluey-green, or a pinky-purple, as I didn't want to confuse her. Or should I just be saying its aqua, or turquoise, or teal (actually I'm a bit confused by all of these myself!), or magenta etc.

The reason is my DD is only 15months and that is why I'm hesitating. She can identify and name all of listed colours (she learnt them from using her crayons but she can name them in all other contexts as well). But given her age I was unsure about introducing more colours and whether it would be too much or whether she could handle the in-between colours too

Grey isn't hard - we just don't have a grey crayon so we haven't really talked about it before. Same for white.

Oh wow - I am so bad at this in myself it hasn't even occurred to me to be teaching DS anything other than the basics...and he's 2...and 3 months... I might have to study some colour swatches and learn the proper names for colours so I can teach them to DS

My boy is 17.5m and basically points and grunts to get his needs met. He does have words - car, mum, dad, rain, etc - but man, he's light years away from colours!!!

People vary in how well they can distinguish colours. My DS knew all his basic colours at 12 months and he loves colours. DD on the otherhand learnt them a bit later and even at 3 struggled to tell the difference between green and blue (she couldn't actually perceive the difference). Funnily enough DH often says blue things are green and he can never tell me what colour someone's hair is if he's describing a person to me (so I think it's genetic).

~~HappyMummy~~ yes she is an early talker so I guess that helps with the colour identification, which did come as a bit of a surprise to me too. As well as learning from the crayons we have a book that has a lot of different coloured squares on one page and she used to point from one to the other continually and I would name them all (many times over) - I didn't think she was actually memorising them this early tho.

That's just given me an idea with the in between shades - I can print out a similar page to that book. If she is interested she can ask the name, if not no worries.

My daughter will be 3 in April and so far we've done: red, blue green,. yellow black white and grey, purple, orange and brown.We've just started on 'blue green' as she loves saying it, but I honestly don't really care yet if she can't tell the difference between teal and turquoise.I doubt even in early to mid primary school they'd be bothered too much if the child doesn't say teal or cyan.

My daughter also loves colours, and so her enquiry led to us playing colour games (we found over 30 blue things in the garden one afternoon - I was quite blown away!) but don't be too tied up in what milestone/what age knots. When she moved from the Penguins (2-3 year old) to the Dolphins (3-4 years old) room, the teachers were quite blown away as many kids don't know nuances of colour until kindy/pre-school.

By the same token, some kids her age know types of dinosaurs - whereas she just make that horrible screechy roar and mum shudder - so it really is horses (or pterodactyl) for courses.

I'm not pressuring her to learn the colours before school but if there is something bluey-green and she wants to know what it is, then that is why I was asking - do I tell her or not etc. Would it be confusing to know the proper name, or do I just go with the closest colour?

It's just for her own interest - she gets excited by naming colours. If she wasn't interested she wouldn't have sat there and pointed at them non-stop for me to name them

I'm not pressuring her to learn the colours before school but if there is something bluey-green and she wants to know what it is, then that is why I was asking - do I tell her or not etc. Would it be confusing to know the proper name, or do I just go with the closest colour?

It's just for her own interest - she gets excited by naming colours. If she wasn't interested she wouldn't have sat there and pointed at them non-stop for me to name them

Then go with it! If she is curious, the best thing in the world is for her to get some answers - even if it is "well, it is a sort of green - some people call it Turquoise - isn't that a beautiful word"

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